Then they (all three: the fleshless cadaver, Iglésia and Georges—they dressed now like farmhands, that is, vaguely uncomfortable, vaguely embarrassed, as if—abandoning their heavy carapace of cloth and leather—they felt almost naked, weightless in the weightless air) were outside again, floating in that kind of enormous emptiness, that cottony void surrounded on all sides by the sound or rather the somehow calm murmur of the battle, and then the three planes appeared, grey, low, fishlike and not very fast, flying parallel and horizontally with slight variations in altitude which made them waver, rise and sink imperceptibly in relation to each other, exactly like fish undulating in the current, strafing the road behind them (Iglésia, Georges and the cadaverous man motionless now but not trying to hide, standing in the lane the hedge up to their chests, staring, Georges thinking: “But there’s nothing left but corpses It’s silly they’re firing on They can’t expect to kill them twice”), the machine guns making a faint noise like sewing machines, absurd, without conviction, quite slow, not even as loud as the sound of a two-cylinder pump, like this: tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . tap . . . lost, absorbed, drowned in the enormous motionless countryside (from where they were nothing moved on the road), under the enormous motionless sky, then everything grew still again: the houses, the orchards, the hedges, the sunny fields, the woods that formed the horizon to the south, the calm sound of the cannon, a little stronger on the left, carried by the warm calm air, not very loud and not very insistent, merely there, patient, like workmen somewhere demolishing a house without hurrying, and nothing else.